CHAPTER ONE

INTRODUCTION: THE RIDDLE OF THE BACCHAE

'Euripides says so many things in this play'. T. B. L. Webster, Tragedies of Euripides, 276

Pier Paolo Pasolini, the Italian poet, writer and cineast, who lived from 1922 to 1975, was particularly influenced in his work by Greek tragedy . 1 In Teorema, one of the most difficult of his films to understand, he stages a dramatic situation which appears to be a reflection of Euripides' Bacchae. 2 An unknown, silent visitor comes one day into a wealthy bourgeois family (the father is a Milan industrialist), and arouses in the whole family, father, mother, son, daughter, and their maid, an erotic desire which leads each one of them to a psychological crisis. The visitor leaves as suddenly as he appeared, but their love for him caused a radical change in those he leaves behind. The maid, Emilia, who represents the peasant proletariat, returns to her birthplace, where she becomes a saint and works miracles; she is buried alive, but her tears continue to flow and become a spring. The bourgeois characters too are transformed: the daughter lies perpetually paralysed in bed; the son becomes an abstract painter, but realizes his failure and at the end of the film urinates against his paintings. Lucia, the mother, drives in her car along the pavements of the Milan streets, looking for young men for whom she can be a whore, while the father gives his factory to his workers, and in the last sequence of the film, surrounded by the crowds in Milan station, he strips, runs outsided, and, naked, climbs the bare, smoking heights of a volcano. The first and most interesting correspondence between the Bacchae and Teorema is probably the background of ideas behind the dramatic conflict. However many different and widely divergent interpretations have been published about Euripides' intention with the Bacchae, it is impossible in

1 Pasolini made two cinematographic interpretations of Greek tragedy: Edipo Re (1967) and Medea (1969). He also translated, and wished to film, Aeschylus Oresteia, transposed to modern Africa. He never achieved this, but there is a documentary account of his preparations produced on 16 mm film: Appunti per un Orestiade Africana (1969). 2 1968, with Giuseppe Ruzzolini (camera), Nino Basagli (montage), Franco Rossellini and Manolo Bolognini (production), Aetos Films, Rome, 35 mm., black/white and col­ our, 98 minutes. Pasolini first intended Teorema to be a tragedy written in verse, but he changed his mind about this. In its place he published a novel, Teorema, Milan 1968. He made the film from the novel. 2 THE RIDDLE OF THE BACCHAE such interpretations to avoid dealing with the concepts of wisdom, cleverness and soundness of mind, which occur frequently in the play. Time and again the chorus' declaration in line 395: 'cleverness is not wisdom,' appears crucial for the interpretation; by it the chorus possibly mean that man's capacity to rationalize drives him away from insight in­ to the human condition, for which he must have the irrational acceptance of Dionysus. 'Thus it is true that the god of wine lays bare the emotional nature, the fundamental passions of men, Eros in its deepest and its widest sense, and in a sense therefore Dionysus may be taken as a symbol of those passions. Recognize them as a necessary and welcome element in human life, allow them to live in you and with you; they will give you loveliness and joy. Ignore them, and they will conquer you as they did Agave, and become themselves ugly in the process. Deny them altogether, fight them, proclaim that they do not exist, and they will tear you limb from limb like Pentheus. And in that process the god has in truth become a fiend'. 3 In these lines of Grube's-just as in his later views about the play4 -the thought is implicit that this is the message or the moral of Euripides' Bacchae. One of the questions which this study seeks to answer is whether or not this is so. In Pasolini's Teorema we are confronted with a conflict that is com­ parable with the vision of the Bacchae formulated by Grube. Rational bourgeois thinking is pitted against the irrational acceptance of what Pasolini calls 'metaphysics', 'authenticity', 'the ancient feeling for holiness', what in Marxist terms is called 'metahistory' and Catholic terms 'mysticism'. 5 This authenticity is embodied ( a second parallel with the Bacchae) in the figure ofa stranger, a visitor, who-and in view of the ambiguity of the word aocpoi;: 'wise', 'clever', in the Bacchae this is a rele­ vant complication for us in the conflict-is not the exact counterpart of a member of modern capitalist society. 'Ce personnage est devenu ambigu, a mi-chemin entre l'angelique et le demoniaque. Le visiteur est beau, il est hon, mais il a aussi quelque chose de vulgaire ( car c 'est un bourgeois lui aussi). 11 n'existe pas de bourgeois non cultive qui ne soit pas vulgaire; car seule la culture peut purifier. 11 y a en lui cet element de vulgarite qu'il a accepte d'avoir pour descendre parmi ces bourgeois. 11 est done ambigu. Ce qui est authentique par contre, c'est !'amour qu'il suscite parce que c'est un amour sans compromis, un amour hors des com­ promis avec la vie, un amour qui provoque le scandale, un amour qui detruit, qui modifie l'idee que le bourgeois se fait de lui-meme; l'authen-

3 G. M.A. Grube, Dionysus in the Bacchae, TAPhA 66 (1935) 54. 4 The Drama of Euripides (1941) 419. 5 Pasolini in an interview with Jeune Cinema 33 (October 1968) 7-8.